MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: ARCADE32/64 0.185

> From Haze's posts and Vas Crabb response it sounds like Mamedev will accept external
> submissions (code, ROMs and infos) exclusively via mamedev dot org;
> working with, or sending code to, individual team members isn't an option anymore,
> which would be a shame if true.
> Or it is just a speacial Haze treatment, which would also be sad.

The preferred method for accepting code submissions is via pull request on github. This makes it easy for the team to provide feedback and get any issues addressed. You can see this in action clearly with a PR like this one. Comments can be placed alongside the code in question, discussion history is preserved, and everything is out in the open.

If you can't use a PR for whatever reason, the e-mail address for contributing code is "code at mamedev dot org" (please don't post the actual machine-readable address - spambots tend to pick it up). This address has a bus factor higher than one and ensures the team gets to a chance to see it. Of course the review/feedback process is more cumbersome if it's done this way, because it has to go back and forth over e-mail.

If you do e-mail an individual team member, to code is subject to the same standard review as any other external submission. That means the developer either has to apply this standard themselves, post it to the list for review, or create a branch and open a pull request. There have been multiple instances where an individual has pushed something sent to them individually resulting in outcry from the team. There was a prominent example of this concerning a handheld system that didn't involve me or Haze at all (the person who pushed the submission and subsequently reverted it was mmicko, you can search commit history if you really want to find out what it was).

MAME is a big project, and it's now two decades old. We have, to use a buzzword, a lot of "technical debt". This makes it harder to maintain and improve things. Part of it is caused by things improving but code not being updated to make the most of it. We have a lot of code that isn't making the best use of C++14, because no-one's taken the time to go over it and make applicable improvements. Some of it is crud from when someone re-implements some common component and doesn't update all the uses. But there's a lot of stuff where people have just made a poor effort and then abandoned the code.

As a project grows, it becomes more important to keep it clean to avoid ending up with an unsupportable mess. As such we have to maintain some kind of minimum standard for what goes into the tree. Issues are raised all the time with code pushed by team members as well. A few releases ago we had probably half a dozen commits by team members reverted. It isn't personal, it happens to the best of us. You just don't hear about it because it's handled on appropriate channels by people who act like adults (for the most part).

No-one is being singled out, there's no change in policy. We are slowly raising the bar for code quality, because we want to make sure MAME will be around for another two decades, and not become that mess of unreadable code that no-one wants to touch.